VF at the Oxford Literary Festival: Elizabeth Drayson, The Hidden Islamic Sources of the European Enlightenment

21/03/2026, 12:00 pm

Voltaire Foundation Lecture: The Hidden Islamic Sources of the European Enlightenment

Elizabeth Drayson talks to Miles Young

Saturday, 21 March 2026

12:00pm

1 hour

New College: New Space

£10 – £18

To purchase tickets, please follow this link.

Expert in medieval literature and cultural history Dr Elizabeth Drayson explains how Islamic knowledge laid the foundations for the age of reason.

Drayson draws on her new book, Crucible of Light: Islam and the Forging of Europe from the 8th to the 21st Century, to explore the deep yet little known connections between the European Enlightenment and Islamic civilisation. She explains how Muslim learning pervaded the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries that gave birth to Descartes’ Discourse on the Method and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. The new philosophical ideas championed by Voltaire and Rousseau likewise had hybrid origins not only in western European thinking but also in Muslim philosophy and science. Drayson says that from religious tolerance to coffee, carpets and tulips, the influence of Islamic customs and thought underpinned the life of Enlightenment Europe and transformed its identity.

Drayson is emerita fellow in Spanish at the University of Cambridge and specialises in medieval and early modern Spanish literature and cultural history. She is author of The Moor’s Last Stand: How Seven Centuries of Muslim Rule in Spain Came to an End and Lost Paradise: The Story of Granada. Drayson will be introduced by Miles Young, the Warden of New College and president of the festival.

Presented by the Voltaire Foundation, which aims to disseminate world-leading research into the Enlightenment and bring the debates of Voltaire and his contemporaries to the widest possible audience. This lecture is supported by the United Grand Lodge of England in recognition of the strong connection between Freemasonry and Enlightenment values.

Part of the festival’s programme of Islamic literature and culture.